1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to software programs that represent information in a thumbnail, and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus to improve the usability of thumbnails.
2. Description of the Related Art
One form of thumbnail comprises a reduced-size (scaled) version of an image. Such thumbnails are useful for recognizing and organizing images similar to the way a normal text index helps to identify and organize words. Visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use thumbnails, as do most modern operating systems or desktop environments, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME, among others.
Further, thumbnails are used in applications to show reduced size previews of a portion of a screen/region and/or reduced size versions of documents. Conventional thumbnails show a miniature version of a screen region they are representing exactly as the region is otherwise visible, i.e., the view of the thumbnail is limited to the visible layer of the represented screen region. From the thumbnail alone, a user does not have a way to determine if there are any hidden content/layers behind the visible content. For example, a region having a first window overlapping or covering a second window, when scaled to a thumbnail, will also have the windows overlapping. Thus, the information within the second window is fully or partially obscured and may be fully or partially covered by the first window. Moreover, after scaling the windows to form a thumbnail, even partially covered windows are hard to interpret. Additionally, the scaling process may result in the window boundaries becoming merged (more so if the windows are near each other) to such an extent that the thumbnail no longer represents the arrangement of the windows on the screen.
Further, for document representations, there may be many such hidden layers that may go unnoticed by the user. For example, the user may be searching for certain content which is actually hidden behind other content on a screen being viewed by the user. A thumbnail representation is useless in displaying the hidden content. Moreover, the top layer of the content is often not very informative to the user as the underlying layers. For example, if a document is made into a thumbnail representation, the thumbnail image shows the first page which may not be informative to the user e.g., the first page may be blank or contain only a confidentiality notice. The title or abstract of the document may be on a subsequent page, which may be the preferred view for a thumbnail. Current thumbnail generation techniques scale only the visible content to form the thumbnail; thus, occluding the underlying pages.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus to improve the usability of thumbnails.